Today I went to a tattoo artist, and for $60 I let a man with a giant Jesus-tattoo on his head ink a semi-colon onto my wrist where it will stay until the day I die. By now, enough people have started asking questions that it made sense for me to start talking, and talking about things that aren’t particularly easy.

We’ll start here: a semi-colon is a place in a sentence where the author has the decision to stop with a period, but chooses not to. A semi-colon is a reminder to pause and then keep going.

In April I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. By the beginning of May I was popping anti-depressents every morning with a breakfast I could barely stomach. In June, I had to leave a job I’d wanted since I first set foot on this campus as an incoming freshmen because of my mental…

This explains a lot, in my perception of my own life and how I relate to other people. If my true love is out there and is reading this somehow, somewhere I’m sorry I’m broken and scared to love and be loved by anyone because we’re doomed to fall out of love and get hurt. Being the child in a divorced family can be traumatizing
even if you can’t tell at the time. I really wish love could be a forever thing, but with divorce rates over 50% these days its hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, ya know?

1. We love cautiously. We’ve seen heartbreak and not just in our own lives. We take commitments seriously, which is why we don’t make them often.

2. We believe in big love because we know it was at the root of our parents’ marriage, before it imploded. We believe in run-away-together kind of love stories, because we heard those stories first hand.

3. But we’re also pretty sure big love ends in shambles. We’ve never seen otherwise. Whenever we’ve seen passion and fire, we’ve also seen the wreckage it leaves behind.

4. We optimistically believe that no love ever dies. We were told that “deep down” our parents still loved each other, even as one of them was moving out of the house. We wanted to believe that would always be true. That’s why when we break up with someone, whether it’s a significant other or a friend, we still…